Using Dolphin and starting from /, I did a search for vlc. The two offending packages listed above did not appear in the search results list returned by Dolphin. I take it from this that these two packages are not on the system.

@PCNetSpec:
No, I haven't tried that, even though this update alert has been appearing for a couple of weeks now. You'll see below why that's not an issue now.

@Rhaklos:
Your eyes are better than mine! I hadn't noticed the change of case. (':oops:')

To quote that well known Roman saying, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum...

After I had posted into this forum, the contents of the update alert changed. Now, instead of all the packages listed above, there is a single package which is not part of that list. In other words, since posting to this forum, the problem appears(!) to have fixed itself.

Hmm, curiouser & curiouser...

Thanks again for the replies. Let's just hope that the problem stays fixed.

Thanks for the reply. At this late stage, I just can't remember where I got vlc from. It may have been directly from the vlc website. I tend to stick either with the mag's DVDs in the first instance, then a distro's own website and its repo, or finally go directly to a given package's website.

This came about because an update alert kept appearing at the top of my screen but when I tried to accept the update, the system complained of not being able to resolve a couple of dependencies, as I stated in my previous posts.

As you will see in my second post, the problem seemed to resolve itself after(!) I sent in my first post on this thread to the forum. Yet the problem had existed on my system for a few weeks before that. Also as I said in my previous post, curiouser and curiouser ...

Since the problem seemed(!) to fix itself(?!), the update alert seems to be working "normally". On its last appearance it listed only one package to be updated which had nothing to do with vlc, as far as I know.

The problem was due to a depend's issue originating with ffmpeg 2 supplied by @packman
Most openSUSE users don't use Apper, as it doesn't honour the package switching settings applied in the Yast Software Manager

Thanks for the reply. With respect to not using Apper on openSUSE, I agree. With previous versions of this distro it was always Yast/Software Management that I used for installing packages from the repo.

However, 12.3 came with and installed Apper as well as Yast. I've been jumping between these for package installation. Maybe on this distro I should stick strictly with Yast/Software Management.

No I haven't used/visited @pacman so I really don't understand how that can be connected to this situation. This distro is the i386 DVD ISO that I downloaded directly from the openSUSE website and burned to DVD.

Oh well, at least I've learned something that I probably would not have learned otherwise.

Thanks for the reply. With respect to not using Apper on openSUSE, I agree. With previous versions of this distro it was always Yast/Software Management that I used for installing packages from the repo.

However, 12.3 came with and installed Apper as well as Yast. I've been jumping between these for package installation. Maybe on this distro I should stick strictly with Yast/Software Management.

No I haven't used/visited @pacman so I really don't understand how that can be connected to this situation. This distro is the i386 DVD ISO that I downloaded directly from the openSUSE website and burned to DVD.

Oh well, at least I've learned something that I probably would not have learned otherwise.